'Bannelong sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip and drank his wine and coffee as usual': Aborigines and wine in early New South Wales

There is something surprisingly contemporary – and at the same time disturbing – in Philip Gidley King’s First Fleet journal entry that ‘Bannelong sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip, and drank his wine and coffee as usual’. The late eighteenth-century relationship between Bennelong and British colonists which led to the Aborigine’s selective acceptance of European ‘civilisation’ is one of the earliest documented transnational exchanges in colonial Australia. Ironically, more than two centuries later, while wine is one of the nation’s most significant European-derived agricultural exports, Indigenous Australians battle debilitating alcoholism in a tragic cultural limbo.